Amit Gupta’s Blog

Who the Hell Are You?

You may be a recent subscriber at Photojojo, or you may be a new customer at The Photojojo Store.

Either way, I don’t know who you are.

I signed up for a new telephony service today called Grand Central. An hour later, I got an email from the CEO. He’d checked out my blog, knew who I was, and asked for feedback. I was flattered, and offered him what I could.

I used to look at every new Photojojo subscriber as they came in. If they had a custom domain name for their email address, I’d it out. Then we started getting more and more signups. Some days, we now get hundreds. It isn’t possible for me to check ‘em all out anymore.

I hate this.

I want a centralized database filled with people I should be paying attention to. Journalists, technologists, people who work at companies I care about, VIPs, sneezers, whoever I specify. And I want to be automatically notified whenever any of these people signs up for my newsletter or buys something from my store.

Why doesn’t something like this exist? Why doesn’t someone build something like this using LinkedIn or FaceBook as the database?

It would improve my ability to run my business, and I’d pay for it.

Posted on 16 February '07 by Amit Gupta, under Business, Marketing, Technology.

8 Comments to “Who the Hell Are You?”

#1 Posted by alberto d'ottavi (16.02.07 at 03:39 )

amit, yr rigth. it’s strange that people from communication does not use linkedin or similar enough. may be it’s why they / we are always in information and contact overload. but the idea of a world-wide business network specialized in marketing and communication + journalism etc is good. here in italy there is one magazine in the media biz field, Prima Comunicazione (http://www.primaonline.it), very famous (and costly). they publish a book once a year with names and roles of mktg & comm managers…

#2 Posted by Nick Gray (16.02.07 at 15:08 )

Neat point about checking out people with custom domain names in their email address - it makes a web presence much more obvious. I do the same thing but never thought about it too much.

#3 Posted by rj (19.02.07 at 02:46 )

Wow…I thought of the exact same thing. I run an invite-only social network and I remember when we started out…I would spend way too much time just going through emails to see if there was anything interesting. I would often find my friends on the list or random industry people that I respected/or heard about which was the weirdest thing. Needless to say I’ve gotten over the buzz but someone should definitely come out with a “cool email-finder spider bot”!

#4 Posted by noah kagan (19.02.07 at 14:46 )

I created something awhile ago, http://www.peoplereminder.com/home.php

It may be what you are looking for but it does not integrate into linkedin/fb that well.

I know 37 signals is coming out with something called highrise which may help.

let me know if you find anything.

#5 Posted by Amit Gupta (19.02.07 at 14:51 )

I think the 37Signals jobby looks like a simple CRM. But I will def post here if I find something awesome.

Amit

#6 Posted by Jamie Wilkinson (03.03.07 at 17:21 )

http://internetfamo.us

stay tuned ;)

#7 Posted by Amit Gupta (03.03.07 at 17:25 )